Julian Assange Goes Where Glenn Greenwald Wouldn’t

Though they're often lumped together as crusaders against state secrets, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald don’t always see eye to eye.

Their differences spilled into public view this week, when the WikiLeaks Twitter account took Greenwald and his site, The Intercept, to task for redacting the name of a country where the United States government is recording every phone call.

On Monday, Greenwald, Ryan Devereaux, and Laura Poitras revealed that American national-security operatives have been recording all calls in the Bahamas, and that the same program, MYSTIC, is scooping up metadata in Mexico, Kenya, and the Philippines.

That’s a significant reveal, and it goes much further than The Washington Post did in March, when Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani wrote on the N.S.A.’s capability to record full-take audio.

But Greenwald’s The Intercept wasn't ready to reveal the name of a second nation where such capabilities were being applied, “in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence.” That act of caution caught the attention of the WikiLeaks Twitter account, which went on a tear and accused Greenwald of “painting future publications into a corner with this Pentagon line.”

Greenwald responded by pointing out that WikiLeaks had redacted information in the past, and noted that the government had strongly urged The Intercept to redact the names of all the countries involved. Though the debate continued for some time, it ended somewhat abruptly, when WikiLeaks tweeted, “We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.”

After a slight delay curiously blamed on “media cycle reasons,” WikiLeaks delivered: the site released a statement Friday morning that identified Afghanistan as the country redacted from The Intercept’s reporting.

“We do not believe it is the place of media to ‘aid and abet’ a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population,” Assange’s statement read. “Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan.”

“The Intercept stated that the U.S. government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a ‘rise in violence,’” Assange continued. “Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.”

WikiLeaks did not provide any corroborating documents for its reporting, claiming that “reasons of source protection” precluded the organization from disclosing how it “confirmed the identity of the victim state.”

In earlier WikiLeaks tweets, the organization had argued that whether or not political disquiet occurred as a result of the revelation was irrelevant to the moral question of publishing.

If a nation wants to engage in a revolt on the basis that the US government is recording all their phone calls, that is their right.

Greenwald, for his part, appears to have turned his attention to other matters. On Friday, he published a response to the harsh New York Times review of his book, No Place to Hide. (The review was written by Michael Kinsley, a Vanity Fair columnist.)

The twists and turns of the week’s debate highlight journalism’s continuing reckoning with the revelation of the N.S.A.’s various mass-surveillance programs. Reporting on the Snowden documents won a Pulitzer Prize this year, but much of the American media community remains conflicted about Greenwald’s reporting. (Greenwald has lambasted his critics as weak proxies of the government.)

N.S.A. whistle-blower Edward Snowden, who handed over his trove of documents to Greenwald, has said he also doesn’t believe in Assange’s particularly uniform view on secrecy, having entrusted the cache of N.S.A. documents he lifted to journalists he trusts will evaluate the risks inherent in publishing from them.

“We don’t share identical politics,” Snowden told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “I am not anti-secrecy. I’m pro-accountability. I’ve made many statements indicating both the importance of secrecy and spying, and my support for the working-level people at the N.S.A. and other agencies. It’s the senior officials you have to watch out for.”